Peaceable Kingdoms?
... complete article may be found at the following URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/weekinreview/15read.html ...
Hotel Prose
In "Suite Dreams," Pankaj Mishra, writing in The Guardian, explains his love of room service.
"I wrote all day before retiring to the dining room for supper." For many years, long before I had published anything, I would try out this sentence in my mind. The image it evoked of a writer in a hotel room working at his typewriter seemed to me the very essence of a literary life. ...
Thomas Mann wrote his most famous story, "Death in Venice," at the lido's Hotel Des Bains. Bangkok's Mandarin Oriental and Singapore's Raffles continue to boast of their once-frequent guest, Joseph Conrad. Noël Coward produced "Private Lives" in Shanghai's Cathay Hotel. V. S. Naipaul wrote the novella "Mr. Stone and the Knight's Companion" during his three months in a hotel in the middle of a lake in Kashmir. Emboldened by the royalties from "Lolita," Nabokov left America and spent much of his later life at Le Montreux Palace in Switzerland.
Indeed, it remains hard to think of some writers - Coward, Somerset Maugham - without thinking of room service and the cocktail hour. Their brittle cynicism about human nature could only have been manufactured in the anonymity and solitude of a hotel room. ...
Happily, it is still possible to live for extended periods in some hotels in Asia without mortgaging your house. ... I write this, in fact, from a guest house in Pondicherry, a French colonial town on the South Indian coast, where my sea-facing air-conditioned suite costs less than £12, and the restaurant downstairs offers full meals for 75p.
The guest house, run by the local ashram, is very efficient, even though it tries too hard to make ascetics of its guests. There is no room service, except for morning tea. A printed notice on my door forbids the consumption of cigarettes and alcohol. I have failed to find the "do not disturb" sign, and the staff knock often and peremptorily. ...
However, these are minor irritations; and it may be that I had been looking all along for a monastery rather than a hotel. It is certainly very gratifying to keep regular writing hours; and I think I will be pleased to be able to say about Jan. 1, 2006, that I wrote all day before retiring to the dining room for supper.